Annika: So today I have with me Peter Joseph. He is a person who has their degree in psychology, working on their MS in exercise nutrition. He’s a personal trainer, has certifications in human potential coaching, all of this fun jazz, and is very much focused on basically developing good habits with your sports, your nutrition, everything like that. And he also has ADHD himself. So today we are going to be talking mainly about how do we create sustainable habits with fitness and nutrition when you have ADHD, because essentially that just makes everything so much harder. So thanks so much for joining, Peter. Excited to talk about this.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s a different beast when you’re trying to develop sustainable fitness change, and one of the reasons why is because we’re just working with so many other things. We have this idea that the gym is the thing that gets us moving, and it’s not the only thing that does, because it can be overstimulating. There can be a lot to focus on, a lot of different senses activated, and then it’s just intimidating in that way. So if we find things that work for us, that’s how we can go about it.
Annika: Yeah, and that’s definitely what I found. Because both of us have a background in psychology, we’ve learned pretty much excessively about how to build habits according to the general knowledge in psychology: start small, don’t make big grand ideas, do successive steps, add before you subtract things. But it is a little bit different when we have ADHD. So let me start there: why does it feel like ADHD makes habit building so much harder?
Peter Joseph: So part of the reason is because we have a hard time remembering things short term, so we don’t have as much ability to recall it over and over again. By the time we do it, it’s all of a sudden, “Oh, I forgot I had to do that.” So we need the constant reminders and to be able to organize it. Time management and organization skills are among the things that need to be developed. It is a developable skill, if that’s a word we can use, but it takes time for us to be able to do it. So if your life is this raging mess of chaos, why are you going to add fitness on top of it, right? Because it just makes it that much harder to organize. But it is one of those things that helps regulate us, and that is one of the reasons why we need it in our life, because it could be the potential thing that helps us get organized. I organize my life around my fitness stuff. If you develop the right tools, you can make it happen.
I am a personal trainer. In person I still do some of that stuff, and I work some weeks 60 hours and other weeks 30, it really just depends. That is a horrible schedule to try to find time to get any type of exercise in, right? So obviously what I do, well, maybe it’s not obvious, I put it in my calendar. I’m just like, “This is my time.” I have specific days where I’m like, “We’ve got to end at this time,” or I shift it to a little later, but I’m like, “Got to go either way.” And then I coordinate with my wife, where I’m like, “Hey, can you cook the food for me please?” So we have our meal prep set, and that seems to be a helpful thing. But organization is very helpful for doing it, and unfortunately that is not the best skill to lack. I mean, today I messed up on the podcast thing, to where I ended up scheduling a client not at the best of times in order to have a full hour on this podcast. So it’s just another example of ADHD, right? So yeah, time management unfortunately is not usually a strong suit.
Annika: And I think that’s also something that we get caught up in when we think about creating exercise habits, because in our mind it can seem like such a huge commitment, when in reality it’s not. We don’t have to be doing two-hour workouts five days a week, that’s the reality. It’s okay to just do a 30-minute walk, right? It’s okay to even just do a five-minute walk, really.
Peter Joseph: So one of the things I actually teach a lot of my clients is the life integration technique, where it doesn’t have to be its own separate thing, because if we’re able to incorporate it into our life to where it kind of compounds, that’s a way to do it. There’s this technique called the Pomodoro technique. It’s used for productivity with CEOs a lot of the time, and we can adjust and modify it to use for our fitness. It’s like, “Oh okay, I’m at home at my desk because I’m working from home,” or “I’m at work, in my office,” whatever, and then you take 20 minutes where you’re in focus. Sometimes we have hyperfocus, so it’s a little different, but bear with me here. Then every time you get a break, you do five minutes of, “Oh okay, five minutes of bodyweight squats,” or “Let me get my heart rate up so I can focus a little bit more, I’m feeling a little run down, let me jog in place for a minute.” It doesn’t have to be these huge things, but five minutes plus one minute plus one minute plus one minute, that all adds up to a culmination of something. If you use the Pomodoro technique, or even not use the Pomodoro technique but every hour you do maybe five minutes of exercise, and there are eight hours in your workday, that adds up to, if I’m doing the math right, 40 minutes, right? I’m not the best mather, so I went up to pre-calc and I said, “Nope, we’re good.”
Annika: Now I feel like there are two different types of ADHDers: ones that are really good at math and love it, and ones that hate it. I’m the hate-it kind. I like algebra, but that’s about it.
Peter Joseph: Algebra is so interesting, like the puzzle of it.
Annika: Oh, but anyway. I feel like another aspect of getting a person with ADHD to start moving is that motivation aspect.
Peter Joseph: Yes, the just-getting-started hurdle, because with us it’s almost like we have a boulder to move before we actually do it. What I like to do with that is the minimum viable option, or minimum effective effort, however you want to go about that, right? A minimum effective effort is keeping the momentum going. Before you sit down, because it sucks to just get back up, right, to where we go and do the thing, going and doing the thing could just be going downstairs. That’s walking downstairs and then walking back upstairs. That’s a way we can do it. It’s just the minimum we can do until we can do the maximum.
I like to rock climb, and I do that three, four days a week, and all I have to get myself to do is drive from the place of work to the rock climbing gym. That’s my minimum effective effort right there, because that ends up steamrolling me for the rest. I’m just like, “Well, I just wasted 20, 25 minutes to get here. Am I really not going to walk in?” Some days I have been tempted to just drive away, right? And I was like, “Well, I’m already here, let me just do 10 minutes and get it over with,” and then I end up being there for the full 60 to 90 minutes that I chose to be there for, because I’m like, “Hey, I’m already here.” Then I got myself in the swing of things and I was like, “All right, cool, we’re good to go.” So it’s just kind of like minimizing the barrier to entry.
One of the other things you can do is set your environment up to do so. One of the ways I like to do this is, in my car I have my rock climbing equipment, because that’s what I know I need in order to go rock climb, right? I don’t feel like paying for rentals, and the rentals suck most of the time. It’s fine getting started, but it’s one of those things where once you get a taste of the good deal, you don’t want to go back.
Annika: Oh yeah. At the moment I tried the rental after having my gear for a few years, it was like, “Oh, no.”
Peter Joseph: Yeah, it’s like, “No, these shoes suck, my climbing sucks,” you know? So anyway, what I end up doing also is I have my meals in the fridge, ready to go. Depending on how you want to go about this is another story. I’m using my life as an example, and we’re not all as streamlined as me with this, because I’ve been doing it a hot minute. So I have my meals in the fridge, and I have my lunch box in the kitchen by the fridge so I can move my meals from the fridge into the lunch box. I eat dinner before I go climb so I’m not hungry while I’m climbing. One of the ways to go about this is to see why you end up stopping, like why you end up not doing it. “Oh, I’m hungry.” Okay, well, how do I make myself not hungry for when I go do this thing, right? It’s like, “Oh, I don’t have my gym clothes, and if I go home I’m going to stay home.” Well, what I end up doing is, I’m just like, “I’m not going to go home then. I’m going to put my gym clothes in my bag and bring it with me.” So these are ways I’ve overcome the obstacles that I know will slow me down and not let me do my exercise.
You might be thinking, “Yeah, well, dude, you’re a personal trainer, you’re a fitness coach, that’s fine for you. What about me?” Well, I’ll tell you this: since I have ADHD, I get bored of the gym itself. I just want to go home. I don’t know if you’ve worked a 12, 14 hour shift, but working out is the last thing I want to do. But I do it because it makes me feel better, and I have to connect it to that. When I don’t do it, I feel a certain way, and if I keep reminding myself of my why, that is helpful, and that’s what I recommend my clients do too. So if you work back from the problems that you end up having when you first initially start to try to do your habits, that’s one thing. You set your environment up for success, that’s another thing. And then you really want to just find a rhythm that works for you, start small, then build up on that.
Annika: Wow, that whole thing just made me think, to consolidate it essentially, we want to ask the why for both ends to figure out the motivation aspect to actually get you, if you have ADHD, to do the exercise. So the first half is “why should I do it?” That starting motivation. It actually can help improve your ADHD symptoms, specifically aerobic exercise. We have a lot of data on that one with improving ADHD symptoms. We don’t have a lot of data on resistance training exercise, but I’m sure that’ll come soon. It just hasn’t been studied as much at all, honestly.
Peter Joseph: It’s harder to measure.
Annika: Yeah, yeah. But I mean, with resistance training, that helps us metabolize our nutrients a lot better, so in general, theoretically, it should help even with just improving your digestion, you know? That’s the first why: why do I want to do this? Typically it’s to feel better, but why does it make us feel better? It’s been studied, so I know it does for sure. And then there’s the second half of “why do I not want to?”
Peter Joseph: Yeah, what are the barriers? Two sides of the coin, right? What I call this is creating your fitness funnel, where you start broad on your goal, the direction you want to go, and you connect it with your why, and then you narrow down as you go. Because if you say, “I’m going to go to the gym five days a week for 20 minutes and do this thing,” and then you end up not doing the thing, you’re going to beat yourself up and not do it down the road. So you start broad. What’s the reason why you want to exercise or do your nutrition thing or whatever? First off, okay, cool. What’s one broad aspect that helps you get there? For me, I want to move more to make me feel better, right? So my body doesn’t feel a certain way and my brain doesn’t feel a certain way. That’s two things to get just the general direction on where to go.
Then you start to figure out and experiment where you’re going. You can measure it first if you want to get an idea. You can just use a subjective measurement to see if it’s working: on a scale of 1 to 10, how strong do I feel? On a scale of 1 to 10, how much energy do I have? How’s my mood? Different things like that, so you have at least a subjective tool. If you’re trying to lose weight, there are more objective tools you can use, but this is just in general, for my example based off of me, because I’m trying to be as authentic as possible here. Once you figure that out, you can start to ping-pong around. Our lives are a series of spirals anyway, because we’re bouncing around from everything. If we’re able to record what’s working and what’s not, eventually we’re going to find a pattern. ADHD people are great at pattern finding if they can remember all the things that are happening, so writing it down is going to be helpful for that. And then it’s like, “Oh, now I can consolidate it, I can narrow down even more.” Because if you jump straight into a SMART goal, it makes it very intimidating, because that’s the most narrowed-down form. It’s the end of the thing. If you don’t know what a SMART goal is, it’s basically a system that helps you with goal setting. Remember doing it in grade school, where it’s specific, measurable, and all the other things you want to go with it? But the one thing that is very hard is you don’t know what’s realistic yet for you, because you haven’t done it. You know how marketing and businesses in general have the research and development department? Honestly, I don’t know much about business.
Annika: Okay, well, I’m assuming you know, so yes.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, so think of it this way. Before you do something, you want to know if there’s a market there. For instance, we’re on an ADHD podcast, and we want to make sure there are enough ADHD people who have an interest in listening about nutrition and fitness and other things before we do it, otherwise it’s just a waste of time and we’re not getting anything going here, right? So we’re seeing what works. If you go out and just spend a bunch on ads and you realize, “Oh man, those ads aren’t working,” are you going to keep running those ads?
Annika: So kind of like thinking of our exercise journey as ads.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, for ourselves. Exactly. You’re running, and you think of the money as energy, like our energy levels, our executive function. If you keep running your executive function into the ground and getting nothing in return from it, are you going to keep doing it? No. So we have to have a research and development phase, and that’s where that experimentation portion is, before you narrow all the way down. So you just don’t go do the thing that doesn’t work. We’re obviously predicting it’s not going to work, and then we’re creating systems to support it when we realize it is something we actually want to do, at least for a portion of time. Then you can dedicate portions of time, like “I’m going to do it for six weeks” or whatever, because it takes six weeks for it to get into the brain that actually makes it a habit anyway. At first it’s all executive function, and then it gets automated a little bit, and that’s the thing we want to do.
Annika: I’m honestly super curious if there’s been any research on ADHD and how long it takes to form real habits. I don’t know what there is, that was just a random thought that I had. I feel like it would take longer.
Peter Joseph: You know, it could possibly, due to the brain structures, but from what I understand, it’s a different brain structure being utilized for the habit portion.
Annika: Oh, okay.
Peter Joseph: From what I understand, but what I understand could have been from years ago, you know what I mean?
Annika: Right, and our research changes every single day.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, everything changes, but from what I understand right now, that’s kind of what I’m going to go with, because that’s what I notice makes things a lot easier in general. So if we look at it from that standpoint, it’s like, okay, if I can commit to it for six weeks and it’s not utterly miserable the whole time, like give it a two-week period. If it sucks that whole two weeks, then it’s most likely going to suck for the rest of the time and you’re not going to keep it up. Think of going straight into 60 minutes of running and you’re just like, “This is miserable, I can’t make it to the end.” Well, what are you going to do to adjust? Let’s do five minutes. “Oh, that’s a lot easier. That’s so much better. I’m not going to have my lungs on fire anymore,” you know?
Annika: So I love that. Also, some little tricks for the ADHD brain: instead of saying “Oh, we only have to do it for five minutes, we only have to take a five-minute walk,” say you only have to do a 300… however many seconds that is… walk. That makes it sound so much easier, even though it’s the same. Our perception: everybody can do 60 seconds of something, right? One minute sounds so much longer because it says “minute,” but if you’re like, “60 seconds,” oh, that’s easy. It has “sec” right next to it, that’s going to be great. I can do anything for 60 seconds. Just those little things to trick our brain. Or like what you said, “Sure, I could do 10 minutes of this exercise. Do I want to? Not really. But can I? Sure.” And why not right now? Why not? Ask yourself that until you can’t answer it.
Peter Joseph: And here’s another thing to help, right: gamifying it. We make games out of it. It’s like, “Oh, I bet I can’t do 20 squats before my water bottle fills up,” right? So it’s like, “Oh yeah, you know what, let me give that a try.” And creating mini reward systems for when you do it. Maybe you put some flavoring in your water bottle if you do it, that makes the taste a little bit better, or however you want to do it, right? These little reward systems help because we’re reward-based brains. And then challenges make it to where it’s just like, “Don’t tell me I can’t do something, I know I can do it, let me…”
Annika: Purposely activate your PDA.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, exactly. Purposely activate it, make it to where you trick your brain in your favor, right? Another thing going about that, and it was really cool that one of my clients mentioned this: she put the life integration technique in her bathroom, on the floor, and would look at it and do 10 squats before she brushed her teeth. It was cool to see that in action. So that goes into the visual cues. What she also liked to do was a monthly fitness bingo, where you try to get bingo off of different fitness tasks for the month, and that was a helpful way to keep engaged and get the challenge going, also getting some movement or nutrition in, right? It’s like, “Oh, you know, let’s see if we can get it.” And then the reward was at the end of the month, so it wasn’t immediate, but it was getting her nails done. It’s like, “Oh, let me treat myself to my nails.” So it’s kind of like, “Okay, cool, I can do this thing if I do that.” Obviously you can get your nails done beforehand, but if you hold yourself to the thing where “I’m not going to get my nails done until I do this task,” that’s another story, because now you’re holding yourself accountable. And you could get other people involved. Just try not to get it to activate your oppositional defiance, right?
Annika: So, speaking of other people, I feel like that’s the other key to ADHD fitness.
Peter Joseph: Yes, getting other people involved, whether it is having external accountability through paid services, or partnering up with friends, or just getting into a group. At the gym there are free group fitness classes a lot of the time at most facilities, and that brings a nice camaraderie. It can even be joining a meetup group and doing a walking club or hiking or whatever the hobby you want to do, and it’s like, “Oh, now I made friends there, and these are the people I want to do it with.” Since I do indoor rock climbing, I do ropes once a week. Ropes is where you need another person to belay you, for those who don’t know. Annika and I both rock climb, so we had a little bonding thing over that. My friend and I made an agreement that Monday nights, that’s what we’re going to do together, and that’s the day we show up together, so we have that kind of little pack going on. And then we say, “Hey, I can’t make it that day, let’s do it a different day,” so we’re automatically making this thing. If you make it social, that’s helpful.
But also planning for the failures. You know how I mentioned if I can’t make it this day, we’re going to make it another day? Well, that’s exactly how we should be going about it too. It’s like, “Okay, let’s make our main and then our backups.” That can be done with your scheduling, but it can also be done with the actual workout itself. Say you’re a runner, for instance. What if it’s raining outside, or snowing, or lightning, and you just don’t want to deal with that? Well, what’s a backup you can do? Although it might be boring, you can do indoor running if they have a lap track, or you can go on one of the cardio machines. Personally I’d rather do a circuit workout, but that is just me. So making it that way, and then you can even shift your workouts monthly to make it engaging too. It’s one of those things where it’s like, keep it fresh for your brain. Personally I don’t need to change mine monthly, because with the rock climbing, the walls change monthly, so I just kind of keep what I’m doing and then there’s new stuff out there anyway. But that’s not for a general workout, which is why I’m mentioning these habits.
Annika: Yeah, and I think that brings us to the super important topic of diversity of exercise. In general, that is the gold standard for general human best practices for fitness. However, it’s so much more important for people with ADHD, simply because of that novelty factor. Like you said with the rock climbing, it’s great because we get new routes regularly. However, if all you’re doing is rock climbing, eventually the novelty of those new routes is going to wear down to the point where you might even not want to go rock climbing anymore. That’s where bringing in other avenues of exercise is super important. For me personally, I switch it up. I rock climb two days a week for sure with my husband, and on top of that I will also do a yoga class that week, or a Pilates class, or I will do some strength training that week, and that’s what keeps me still doing it. Or taking a walk, that also counts as a form of exercise. The thing is making sure that we’re not boring ourselves so that we burn out from the exercise that we’re doing…
Peter Joseph: …and allowing for that shift to happen without putting yourself down. Yeah, if you go gung-ho seven days straight, 14 days straight, because you got on an exercise kick, first off you’re most likely going to be sore, and that’s going to be intimidating in itself. And then second off, that novelty will wear off quite fast, because I don’t want to say it’s most likely not going to work out, but you’re just going to be too tired too quick and you’re going to think, “How am I going to be able to keep this up? I have other things I want to do, I have other places to be,” and things like that. One of the ways we incorporate movement as well is, I listen better when I’m moving, so we go on a walk-and-talk.
Annika: Yes! Oh my gosh, my husband and I are trying to do that almost every single day. He’s working from home. It’s huge.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, and it actually allows us to listen. So it’s one of those things where it can be beneficial to our relationships, allow us to have connection with our spouses, partners, friends, whoever you want the connection with, quite frankly. And then it also gets you to be able to somewhat pay attention to them. I say somewhat because you might not be looking at them or anything like that, and nor should you be expected to, because you’re trying not to fall. But it at least kind of gets that other obligation of, “Oh, I don’t have to look like I’m listening now.”
Annika: Yeah, you don’t have to try to focus on, like, “How is my face looking? Am I giving enough eye contact?” Even though they don’t care, because they literally love you.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, there’s still all that subconscious masking. But unfortunately some partners don’t support it as much, and so it’s one of those things where this can get over that boundary a little bit, because it’s like, “Oh well, that’s not the social norm or expectation.” When you’re walking and talking, the social norm is to walk forward, occasionally glance over, and especially on the important moments, and then keep walking, right? So it’s kind of like, “Oh okay, I can look around, I can look at the prettiness and stuff like that,” and then boom. Because unfortunately some partners and family members and friends just still don’t think ADHD is a thing sometimes, or they don’t realize that ADHD is affecting that, and they still want the courtesy of the attention. So this is a great way to kind of shift that, because we do need connection at the end of the day. We’re humans, our brains are wired for it.
Annika: Yeah, and like we said, that connection can help us stay consistent an insane amount.
Peter Joseph: I mean, part of the reason why I continue to rock climb is because of the connection of the community. I run into somebody I know every time I’m there, right? So if you end up making friends and getting involved at these different places, that’s helpful. One thing I do want to note, though, is when you’re looking at hobbies to start off with, try not to spend much money on them right off the bat until you realize you like them.
Annika: Such good, such good advice.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, I have made that mistake and I’d like to save you that mistake. I bought like $300 worth of martial arts equipment, realized how expensive it was, a month later stopped doing the martial arts, because also I didn’t like the community at that specific facility, because a 14-year-old wanted to bully me and I’m just like, “I’m an adult, I’m coming here for stress relief, like, chill.” So it was a combination of all the factors we just mentioned not going in my favor, right? So before you pay, you can pay a little bit, just don’t pay a ton right off the bat. You don’t need top-of-the-line equipment right off the bat. You’re still learning the stuff, you need to give yourself time to learn, and then once you get in the rhythm of it, you can get the more expensive stuff. For me, I made a pact with myself to get the cheaper shoes before I did the other things, and before I got the cheaper shoes I did like two weeks in rentals, and I’m just like, “Okay, fine, I think I’m going to do this a little bit more.”
Annika: So that is genuinely some of the best advice I could think of ever for ADHD with fitness. I mean, I think of that with crafting. You don’t need to get all that stuff. I mean, you might really want to, you might feel like you have to, but let’s be honest, you’re going to forget about it in about a month, if that. And maybe we should definitely treat our fitness in the same way.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, I mean, fitness is forever at the end of the day, right? We’re going to need to do it in order to increase our health spans and our longevity. If you want to live longer, quite frankly, I’d like to not live to 100, because I think that sounds miserable, but I want my quality of life improved, which is health span, during that time up to it, right? I don’t want to not be able to walk around and not be coherently there and things like that, and fitness helps us get to that point. It’s not an immediate reward, but if you notice when you slip off the wagon, that’s because of the culminating effect of not doing the fitness stuff. I work at a community center where I have a lot of retirees that I personally train, because that is one of the demographics there. It’s a community center, so you hit all different types of people. If they had started working out sooner and just maintained it throughout their lifespan, they wouldn’t have declined as much as they currently have. And you notice how young the ones that did do it are, and how coherent they are, because fitness affects our brains, it affects our bodies, it affects our mood. It hits a lot of different things, but we don’t realize its impact until we retire and have the time to do it, because we’re so busy with work instead of making time for it. And that’s the other boundary with it. It’s like, “Well, I need to make money to survive, but I need to make sure my health is good to survive. My health isn’t exactly bad yet, so I’m going to focus on the money thing.” So it’s this Catch-22.
But fitness isn’t just focusing on movement. It is definitely a portion of it, but it’s focusing on sleep, self-care, nutrition, connection, and mindfulness, because you have to notice things before you can make any changes to them, and unfortunately mindfulness is not a strong suit of ours. So cultivating that can be helpful in streamlining towards multiple different things there.
Annika: Yeah, because how are you supposed to realize you need to work out if you’re not able to understand “this is how my body feels right now, this is how it feels when I work out consistently”? Not having that ability to discriminate and be mindful of your body, and just cultivating that intuition about yourself, that is the key.
Peter Joseph: And unfortunately, intuitive eating doesn’t usually work for us right off the bat, because our internal cues we don’t recognize as well, and that’s why it’s hard in general.
Annika: Right. But if you practice it more, you might be able to notice it more.
Peter Joseph: Yes. If you are in the middle of doing a bunch of things at once, you’re most likely not going to notice it because you’re not paying attention to it. But if you take directed time to try to notice it, you will get more familiar with your body and its needs in the long term, because it’s a skill to cultivate, especially if it’s not something we’re used to doing, harnessing and strengthening that portion of the brain. Because you can strengthen different brain structures there. Neuroplasticity for a reason. It just takes a long time.
Annika: Which exercise helps with neuroplasticity.
Peter Joseph: Yes. We were talking about BDNF and all that stuff because of that one book, Spark, and things like that that introduced that topic. It’s one of those things where it does a lot of beneficial things that we don’t even realize. It even shows increased scores at schools when they have more activity rather than not. A lot of schools now are decreasing activity and playtime for kids, when that’s really the thing that should be increased if they want quality scores up, but they shove more math and science down their throats thinking they’re going to get it.
Annika: Wow. I mean, I don’t think a lot about the schools because I don’t have kids, but that is powerful, and that’s the same way we should treat ourselves. Like, think of ourselves as grade school kids.
Peter Joseph: Well, the biggest thing we can do, if we’re not too focused on it right now, and if you do have kids or if you ever want to have kids, is to cultivate these practices for them so they don’t have to think about it. Because kids turn into adults.
Annika: Yeah, but how do we teach?
Peter Joseph: We lead by example, because of the mimicry behavior that happens, right? So it’s a good way to keep yourself accountable if your kids are watching, because you want them to do it. “Do as I say, not as I do” is not going to work very well, especially if they’re ADHD, because they’re most likely going to do the opposite of what you say.
Annika: Oh yep. Sounds great. Is there anything we didn’t cover yet that you want to bring in? I feel like I had random thoughts, but then, classic ADHD working memory, and they’ve escaped me. But I feel like we talked about basically everything with ADHD except for just the fact that you give yourself grace, give yourself time, expect to fail, because when we don’t expect to fail, we are definitely going to fail. That’s the difference between the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. For a lot of people with ADHD, we tend to have this black-and-white thinking, this all-or-nothing way of brain working, and it’s not something that we’re fixed into. Maybe we’re predisposed to that type of thinking, but it doesn’t mean that we have to exist in there. It just means that we’re going to need to do more work, and talking to external people, like talking to your therapist if you have one, or if you have a partner, discussing these types of things and experiences with them and having an outside perspective on your thoughts, because our thoughts are not usually reality. A lot of the time our thoughts are going to be pulling in a lot of non-reality things that are just in our head.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, I go down a lot of rabbit holes. I’m sure a lot of you do too. Since I started taking the medication, it’s a lot fewer rabbit holes. Instead of 10 tabs open, it’s three, which can also help you get the systems in place to delegate your routines and make it easier. You can get off the meds or you can stay on them, it’s up to you and your doctor and whoever you coordinate with and stuff like that. I was against meds for a while, and then I’m just like, “I like experimenting, you know what, screw it, I’ll give it a try.” So I did, and actually I don’t think I’m going to go back for a while, because I’m noticing such big benefits. I have a combo diagnosis of ADHD and anxiety, so I noticed the anxiety is quite down from the treatment of the ADHD too, because some of it was just me going down the doom rabbit holes, like, “Well, what if this doesn’t happen? How can I make this…” You know, like these different things.
So one mistake is not going to ruin your fitness goals. Eating a box of donuts isn’t going to set you off track that much. Your body’s very smart, it adapts, but if you keep eating a box of donuts every day, that’s where it adds up. So if you make one mistake, it’s fine. Get over the perfectionist mindset around it. It’s a lot easier said than done, but making sure you have backup plans, your minimum viable option, decreasing the friction of your environment, and setting everything up in your support systems for success makes it so much easier. I don’t think I would be doing that well with my work schedule and the other stuff I’ve got going on if it wasn’t for coordinating with my wife on helping me get some of the stuff done. She’s home already, she didn’t really have anything she was going to do, and I’m just like, “Hey, can you put the chicken in the oven so it’s ready for when I come home?” And meal prep it, right? So it’s like tag-teaming that effort. She eats the same meal prep for the most part as me, so we’re helping each other anyway. I give her the recipes and make the, excuse me, idea of the meals and everything, and she just puts the main time-consuming things in the oven while I’m doing my time-consuming things, so it’s ready for me when I get home. So it’s kind of just tag-teaming the effort a little bit there.
Annika: I like that. And then also, kind of similar, I really love that you brought up medication, because honestly, for a lot of people with ADHD, if they can get on medication, that’s going to be the difference between actually creating habits and not, because it does help. There’s a reason why it’s there, and there’s a reason why it’s the typical first intervention for at least adults with ADHD: because it works and it’s so helpful. It makes sure that you can start what you need to start, and then if it is, like you said, your path to go off of it, now you’ve had that time to create those connections in your brain, to create those habits and form them, and that’s just super important. It takes off the manual mode from our brain into more automatic mode. We’re not saying go on medication by any means. We don’t have any ties with Big Pharma or anything like that.
Peter Joseph: I get it. No, it’d be nice, then we could get a lot of money.
Annika: Yeah, that would be… it would be unethical, so I don’t think that’s something we could do.
Peter Joseph: I’m a huge fan of lifestyle intervention, because it helps decrease the expression of ADHD symptoms overall, but if you combine that with another tool as well, it helps so much more. So if you can do your best to amplify all the things that help, sometimes it decreases the amount of things you have to do in order to get things going. It depends on where you’re at in life. If you know you don’t have time to do certain things, well, streamlining is always helpful, and sometimes medication helps that, sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on the person and coordinating it. Just because one dose doesn’t work doesn’t mean another dose doesn’t work, and just because one medication doesn’t work doesn’t mean another one won’t work. Personally, I wanted a non-stimulant, let’s see if that works. The first minimal dose, 40 milligrams on the one I’m on, actually, because the recommended is 80 to 120 for people that go on this that are adult ADHDers, that did a lot for me, and part of it is because I have a mild case. There’s mild, moderate, and severe ADHD, and I have a mild case, so I don’t need as much. They’re just like, “Yeah, dude, you know you can raise it,” and I’m just like, “Oh, well, I’ll raise it a little bit, but I don’t think I want to go further than that,” you know what I mean? Just because it feels weird if it’s too much. I accidentally double-dosed one time. I experienced the 80 milligrams and I was like, “Never doing that again.” But also my job doesn’t require as much executive function. Now, I do my job on top of my business of the coaching on the side, which does require a lot of things, plus the master’s program and other things, so there’s a lot going on.
Annika: Yeah, I don’t know what you’re talking about, you have a lot of executive function having to do.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, but it’s all a lot of things I like. The chores are the things I don’t like, so the chores are the harder things, but since I started getting on this medication, I’ve been able to do them more. So what I’m getting at, guys, and girls, and others, is that doing what you can to help you get to where you want to be is going to be helpful, whatever that route is. It can be medication, it can be supplements, it can be whatever, but see what the best option is for you. I was experimenting with supplements a lot. I’m finishing a graduate certificate in dietary supplements, because I was focusing specifically on the relationship between ADHD and dietary supplements, because I wanted to see things that had fewer side effects than medications out there. But at the end of the day, everything has side effects, and you’re going to have to see what works for you. Right now the best thing I can see is omega-3, that and vitamin D and magnesium, if you’re not deficient in them.
Annika: And there’s the clincher: if you’re not deficient. Flip that around. If you’re deficient, it will help. If you’re not, it won’t help.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, correct. It is noticeable that a lot of people with ADHD are more deficient in certain vitamins because of the way we absorb things anyway, so you have to consult your physician on that. There are blood tests and stuff like that that you can do, or get a rough estimate, and there are upper limits and lower limits to supplements. But omega-3s aren’t that present in our diet as much, so that’s usually why you notice a difference when you start taking those, because it makes the neurotransmitters function the way neurotransmitters should.
Annika: And what are we deficient in a lot of the time? Neurotransmitters. Who would have thought.
Peter Joseph: So having that, making sure you’ve got the right vitamins, minerals, and stuff like that. But the other thing on top of it is the combination of L-theanine and caffeine, that I’ve seen success with.
Annika: That was a really interesting study.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, it was. And there are meta-analyses and stuff like that with it now too, so it’s like, “Oh okay, this is actually something that can help.”
Annika: Yes, there is a case for matcha. I love matcha.
Peter Joseph: You know, I need to slow down with matcha. That was my go-to a lot of the time, and I didn’t realize it was because I was undiagnosed. I didn’t realize I had improved energy levels from matcha because I have ADHD. I thought I was just tired and that I needed a little boost, you know what I mean? But I was just like, “Oh, I function better when I take this, let me do it.” I was playing around with some of the functional mushrooms and other things, and there isn’t a lot of data on it, so it’s kind of like shooting darts in the wind. And I was like, “Oh, I’m going to take this daily,” you know what I mean? So I was self-treating without knowing I was self-treating, and realizing what was working. And then when I started improving my protein intake and really focusing on that, I’m just like, “Oh yeah, man, my energy levels are so much better.” You want to know why? Some of the amino acids help build our neurotransmitters. What the fudge, you know what I mean? So there are a lot of interventions we can take that are non-medication based. I still didn’t know when I was doing this stuff that I had ADHD. My partner, when she started living with me, was just like, “Hey, you’ve got this,” because she saw some reels and then started looking into it, and she’s just like, “Hey, you’ve got this, you know?” And I’m just like, “Oh, okay.”
Annika: My gosh, that sounds like my experience. I mean, sort of. It was living with my husband that made me realize, like, “Oh well, we function very differently.” At first I thought you were weaponizing incompetence, or just not doing it, and I know that wasn’t the case because you intentionally tried to do things and put in the effort when you could, and that’s the reason why I started looking at that stuff. So we kind of went around the barrier there, but now we’re way off track on that part. But I think that gives you a nice glimpse of the authenticity of both of us. Well, this was a super fun conversation. I know that you have a client coming up, so we should probably cut it a little short, but before we do, I would love for you just to share more about yourself, anything that you want to tell the audience about what you do, etc.
Peter Joseph: Yeah, so I have a nice project I’m working on right now. It’s called Building Your Fitness Funnel, or Creating Your Fitness Funnel, and it’s a six-week fun program that we build into breaking all this stuff down. That’s the big project right now. It’s a fun thing. We focus more on the fitness habits and building habits in that, rather than the nutrition side, which you should definitely check out Annika’s portion of stuff for, if you want to see the nutrition side. With her Patreon, she’s got a lot of fun subscription stuff in there and nutrition-based things. But that’s what I’m working on right now, and building it to where it’s geared towards ADHD peeps, people with anxiety, and focusing on those different things, and then eventually I’m going to have submodules and other things in there. So if you want to check it out, go ahead and message me and we’ll get it set up. admin@vitalyou.org is my email.
Annika: Nice. And then I will also have basically all this in the show notes, along with your Instagram, just like I do for everybody. But yeah, thanks so much for coming on. It was lovely talking about this with a fellow ADHDer who understands.
Peter Joseph: I really appreciate you having me.
Annika: My pleasure.
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